I saw my friend Teri dancing before I ever met her. It was like seeing Naples and dying. We were at an aftershow party at a working men's club, and she was first out on the floor. Moving like a small-yet-deadly spider, all spiky legs and wriggling. She was the best dancer I had ever seen and I thought I'd never dance again.

Last Saturday night, I was at the Cellar, a subterranean rock'n'roll extravaganza in Camden, dancing with Teri; my lacklustre soft-shoe shuffle performed in the shadow of her extravagant display. This is the siren-call of dancing: how the urge overrides any rationality. You know you will find yourself shipwrecked on the rocks beside the world's best dancer, you know you should stay safely on dry land, sipping your ale by the dancefloor, you know it's late and you've got your coat and you're sailing out the door. But they're playing the Kingsmen's Louie Louie, the Dirty Wurds' Why?, the Buddahs' Lost Innocence. And there's something magnetic mingling in the sweat and the concrete floor and the hot-aired giddiness. How can you resist?

Saturday night reminded me of being five years old and high on the fumes of new carpet, dancing to Steve Winwood's Arc of a Diver with my brother, when we turned out the lights and danced with torches, barefoot and in our pyjamas, until we couldn't breathe. I suppose every dancing experience since has been an attempt to recreate that. The key was we didn't know anything; we'd never danced before and we were making it up as we went along. We were innocents.

You can spend your whole life acquiring the knowledge of how to dance, being taught how to "Mash potato, do the alligator, Put your hand on your hips, Let your backbone slip, Do the Watusi, Like my little Lucy," as Wilson Pickett advised. Or "Do the twist! Do the fly! Do the swim!" as Ray Charles once beseeched us. Or even, as Rufus Thomas once defined the Funky Chicken, "You work both arms and you work both feet, Use a dab of gravy, you right on the beat." You can learn the moves. My dad taught me how to rock'n'roll in the living room, when I was still small enough to be swung over his shoulders; I've learned the twist and the conga and even the Whigfield Saturday Night routine, I've attended ballroom-dancing classes, and really I have to thank my friend Alice for recently teaching me how to perform the Girls Aloud-style dip.

Slowly but surely, you lose your dancing innocence. It becomes about the performance, about shaking your tail-feather for anyone who's watching. You make that mental connection between sex and dancing, and then everything changes. For many years, dancing kept me chaste. It was my contraceptive of choice, because those were the days when dancing was preferable to anything. Indeed, I well recall spurning the advances of a handsome suitor with the line, "I'm sorry, I have to go and dance to the Breeders." Because when I weighed it up in my 15-year-old brain, a Newky Brown-scented kiss in some murky nightclub corner couldn't hope to compete with the intro to Cannonball. But then you have your Eve and the apple moment, the Newky Brown becomes more alluring, and the moves change.

But if you really want to learn how to dance, you have to reconnect with that innocence, you have to forget all the moves. Because moves impose a logic. They're akin to the garden canes you use to train your sweet peas to grow straight. They make everything orderly. And really, I think when you're yearning to dance, it's because you're seeking glorious disorder. Even the glee you feel at performing the perfect lindy hop can't really match clambering up on stage at Wigan Pier Nightspot to simply jump up and down messily to Pulp's Babies. I love dancing because it's one of the few times you can stop thinking. It plain doesn't work when your head-bone's connected to your feet-bones. The knowledge somehow corrupts; as Ian Curtis sang in Joy Division's Transmission, "no language, just sound, that's all we need know".